My Experience of Writing Script

Hi friends. Writing my new post after a long time and wanted to share my experience. Before starting I want to mention it clearly that I am not guiding you how to write a script. It is just what I have experienced while writing. From last couple of years I had an idea of a comedy series of 10 to 12 episodes. Over here I will like to mention one thing for my readers who are not from Pakistan that in Pakistan earlier we didn’t had a concept of soaps. PAKISTAN TELEVISION started making dramas of 50 minutes and of 13 episodes. Later on in late 1990s when the revolution of media came in Pakistan Private TV channels started making soaps. But still Pakistani Public prefer 13 to 20 episodes dramas on soaps. Though I am not denying the fact that soaps also have a big market but still dramas with limited episodes are preferred.
Coming back to the topic, I remember I accidently got this idea while reading Sunday newspapers. As it was an AD which grabbed my attention and after getting that idea I started developing the story. I believe that writing a 13 episode comedy series or drama is much more harder then writing a 90 to 120 minutes film script. So it took me 2 years to plan the story. Another reason for planning the story for so long was that it is a comedy series and I wanted to make it best from the Pakistani perspective. The reason I am using the word Pakistani perspective is because every country has it’s own trends, culture and issues. The issue which I have picked in a light manner might not be of interest for Non-Pakistanis but certainly that’s issue is one of the major issues of Pakistani Public. I have not tried to handle that issue with its actual intensity (negative or positive) but have attached the major character with that issue and the real focus is on that character instead of focusing that issue.

In last 2 month I have complete 2 episodes completely and forwarded it to 3 friends of mine for suggestion. One of them is a professional writer. His opinion was most valuable for me as he was the senior among the three. He appreciated my script and just asked me to refine it by making a little adjustment. The other two friends also appreciated my work and are willing to read the rd episode.

When I had started writing, the first episode took around one whole month because I was totally new in professional writing and I felt that I am not well known to my characters. I rewrote my first episode script 3 times to make it really look good and to satisfy me. The good thing and the most important thing was that’s as I started writing more and more situations started coming in mind, my mind started thinking on more broader basis related to the main theme. Another thing which I experienced was that naturally I started differentiating between the good comedy scenes and poor comedy scenes. From the second episode it became easy for me to understand my characters. I knew very well that what will be the reaction of a certain character in certain situation and in what situation what dialogues will be spoken by particular character.
Making a conclusion I can say by writing these episodes I learned 2 important things. First that as we starts writing, new ideas related to that story starts coming in mind so sometimes even the planned script in mind gets changed. Second thing is that as we write we become more familiar with our characters. And for few people it is better to starts writing rather then developing their characters in detail. Over here make it clear I am not saying that no character development should be made. But for people like me it becomes better to make a rough sketch and write a rough script and then examine that the dialogues and reactions made by different particular characters . The process of developing characters in the best possible way was hard for me so I decided to make a rough sketch of characters and starts writing the first episode keeping in mind that I will have to rewrite it many times. This at-least helped out me.
After I have completed the series I will look forward to get a financer. At the moment just concentrating hard to finish the script of 10 episodes so that I will be fully prepared with the script and will not have the fear of meeting the dead line for completion of script. Lets hope for the best